Sunday, December 25, 2011

Wartime Reports

Mattogno’s
exegeses of wartime reports from the death camps all share in common a number
of bogus assumptions. One such a priori assumption is even clearly spelled out
in the titles of several of his books: that the reports can be dismissed as
“propaganda”.[24]
Yet nowhere in his oeuvre does Mattogno explain what is meant by this term or
justify why calling something ‘propaganda’ necessarily implies its
falsity. That Mattogno doesn’t understand the meaning of the terms he is using
is proven by his frequent invocation of something he calls “black propaganda”,
apparently an especially nasty type of propaganda, if one follows the usage of
the slogan through his oeuvre.[25] But in
actual fact the term ‘black propaganda’ has a very precise meaning, which
Mattogno himself inadvertently quotes when citing Walter Laqueur speaking of
how Polish underground courier Jan Karski “engaged in ‘black propaganda’ among
German soldiers, printing and distributing leaflets in German”.[26] This is
a correct use of the term. Black propaganda is propaganda purporting to come
from the enemy side. Mattogno’s “black propaganda” is nothing of the sort.
Instead, it is just a hysterical repetition of a phrase he liked when he first
read and commented on Laqueur’s book back in 1991, and which is not being
correctly used.[27]

In a number of cases, Mattogno
sails onto thin ice by labelling the wartime reports he so badly wants to
dismiss as ‘propaganda’ when they were nothing of the sort functionally.
One can certainly call newspapers, leaflets and other publicity materials put
out by a particular side in a war or in politics ‘propaganda’, without
necessarily implying anything about its truth or falsity. But one cannot label
internal intelligence reports, diaries, letters or other secret sources as
‘propaganda’ unless one is severely deranged or in the grip of a rabidly
partisan bias. The Polish underground state, the Delegatura, was a shadow
government whose regional branches reported to the centre and then transmitted
those reports to the Polish government-in-exile in London.[28]
Individual units of the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa) filed numerous secret
intelligence reports on what they observed in Nazi-occupied Poland, and these
were then compiled into several serials of memoranda which appeared at regular
intervals. One such serial, the Pro Memoria series of quasi-monthly situation
reports were circulated internally and copied to the government-in-exile, and
remained unpublished.[29] Another
serial, ‘Current Information’ (Informacja Bieżąca), was in fact an internal circular, and not an underground newspaper at all, contrary to
Mattogno’s claim, although editors of the underground newspapers of the very
many political factions in the Polish resistance did then receive it.[30] A
comparison between the reports of the Aktion Reinhard camps written up in Informacja
Bieżąca and what appeared in the Polish underground press shows that the
latter hardly had the space to run all of the information contained in ‘Current
Information’; the largest newspaper, Biuletyn Informacyjny, was just
eight pages long and in 1942 was largely filled with war news from the many
fronts of the now global conflict.[31]
Whatever else might be said about the news of the death camps, it did not
originate as “propaganda”. In similar fashion, the reports gathered and
compiled by Jewish underground organisations such as the Oneg Shabes archive in
the Warsaw ghetto cannot be called “propaganda” without doing considerable
violence to the real meaning of the term. This does not mean that information
received by Oneg Shabes was not passed to the Polish underground press via the
Bureau of Information and Propaganda –
in modern terms, the publicity department of the AK[32] or,
indeed, later, to the outside world[33], but is
a comment on where the information came from. A postcard received from a shtetl
in the Lublin district – just one of the many pieces of documentary evidence in
the Ringelblum archive pertaining to Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka – is not,
and cannot be by definition, “propaganda”. Mattogno will simply have to find
another term for what he is discussing, be more discriminating in his rhetoric,
or continue to earn derision.

Another bogus assumption is also
shared by Samuel Crowell, who like Mattogno seems to have devised a new
correspondence theory of truth to explain away wartime reports of mass murder
and extermination. That is, to claim that such reports originated because of a
“literary evolution” of claims, whereby the changes between different reports
are not the product of outside stimuli (like new information being acquired)
but are instead the product of the unnamed forger/fabricator honing and
sharpening their literary skills and ‘perfecting’ the ‘propaganda’.[34] But in
no case have either Mattogno or Crowell proven such a ‘literary evolution’, a
negationist cliché which is also applied to testimonies. Indeed, Crowell
excelled himself by applying this rarefied version of deconstruction for white
nationalists, their fellow travellers and useful idiots to a testimony by Pavel
Leleko, a Treblinka II Trawniki guard captured by the 2nd
Belorussian Front near Stutthof, whence he had been posted in late 1943 along
with other former Treblinka Trawnikis, and who was interrogated in 1945.
According to Crowell, Leleko was the blueprint for all the statements about the
Aktion Reinhard camps that came after, including the Gerstein report: "all
other confessions, to the extent that they describe the gassing process at all,
show clear traces of harmony with Leleko's testimony".[35] The
hilarity of such a claim is that of course, there had already been a great many
other statements about Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka well before Leleko’s
interrogation in February 1945, and that his statement was then locked away,
unpublished, unused, and entirely unknown outside the Soviet Union until the
second Fedorenko denaturalisation trial in the early 1980s.

Both Mattogno and Crowell, it turns
out, are extraordinarily bad at discerning the provenance of reports and
identifying when a report is derivative and repetitive, versus when it is
entirely independent. This ineptitude is in no small part due to their lack of
awareness of the full range of reports. Pace Crowell, reports of gassing cannot
be reduced to the product of hysterical rumours; pace Mattogno’s implied
argument, there are too many independent sources of such reports to try and
dismiss them as the product of a single ‘propagandist’. And here one must reiterate: implied
argument, because Mattogno nowhere makes it clear from whence the reports
originated, who started them, or why.

In both cases also, reports of
gassings at extermination camps are simply hacked out of their actual wartime
context, with the preceding escalation of violence and its reporting through
underground channels entirely ignored. But it is a matter of record that the
first reports of large-scale, four-figure killings of Polish Jews emerged in
the second half of 1941 from eastern Poland, and were moreover received both by
the Delegatura[36]
and by Oneg Shabes. Indeed, there is now a full publication of the reports
received by Oneg Shabes from the Polish borderlands, the kresy.[37] Such
reports allowed the Delegatura to estimate that over 200,000 Polish Jews had
been murdered by February 1942, a figure which in retrospect was surprisingly
accurate when compared with the known shooting actions in eastern Poland during
1941.[38]

News of Chelmno, meanwhile, not
only reached the Warsaw ghetto via the escaped slave labourer Shlomo Winer,
also known as ‘Szlamek’[39], but
was noted down by AK units in the Warthegau simultaneously.[40]
Moreover, the flight of Szlamek from ghetto to ghetto, using the pseudonym
Yakov Grojanowski[41], left
further contemporary traces, not least in the diary of a rabbi from Konin.[42]
Mattogno’s attempt to defuse Szlamek’s report in his short brochure on Chelmno[43]
therefore need not detain us here, as he will have to go back to the library
before his comments need be taken even vaguely seriously. But Szlamek’s role
did not end with his account of Chelmno. Fearing for his safety, Oneg Shabes
helped Szlamek find a new home under a new identity in Zamosc, the capital of
the county in which Belzec was located. There, Szlamek swiftly discovered that
he had escaped out of the frying pan into the fire, as he related in a postcard
sent to Warsaw between April 5 and 12, 1942 which reached Oneg Shabes: “they
make cold in the same way that they did in Chelmno. The cemetery is in Belzyc.
The towns mentioned in the letter have already been made cold.”[44]

Szlamek himself was probably deported
on April 11 to Belzec, but his knowledge of the nearby extermination camp was
far from unique, as the postwar testimony of the head of the Zamosc Judenrat,
Mieczyslaw Garfinkiel, indicates.[45]
Garfinkiel first heard ‘alarming news’ that the Jews of Lublin were being
transported through Zamosc to Belzec. At first he did not believe the news that
the deportees were being killed there; not even the appearance of several
escapees from the camp convinced him. Only when the son of an acquaintance
returned after escaping did Garfinkiel fully believe what he was hearing.

The local Armia Krajowa command
filed a confidential report in April 1942 which is worth quoting in full, not
least because although it has been published and translated in full in Yitzhak
Arad’s work on Aktion Reinhard, Mattogno sees fit to ignore it entirely in his
book on Belzec:

The camp was fully completed a few days
before March 17, 1942. From that day transports with Jews began to arrive from
the direction of Lvov and Warsaw… On the first day five transports arrived,
afterward, one transport arrived daily from each direction. The transport
enters the railway spur of Belzec camp after disembarkation, lasting half an
hour, the train returns empty…. The observation of the local population (the
camp is within sight and hearing distance of the inhabitants near the railway
station) led all of them to one conclusion: that there is a mass murder of the
Jews inside the camp. The following facts testify to this:1. Between March 17 and April 13, about
fifty-two transports (each of eighteen to thirty-five freight-cars with an
average of 1,500 people) arrived in the camp.2. No Jews left the camp, neither during the
day nor the night.3. No food was supplied to the camp (whereas
bread and other food articles had been dispatched to the Jews who had worked
earlier on the construction of the camp).4. Lime was brought to the camp.5. The transports arrived at a fixed time.
Before the arrival of a transport, no Jews were seen in the camp.6. After each transport, about two freight
cars with clothing are removed from the camp to the railway stores. (The guards
steal clothes.)7. Jews in underwear were seen in the area
of the camp.8. In the area of the camp there are three
barracks; they cannot accommodate even one-tenth of the Jews.9. In the area of the camp, a strong odor
can be smelled on warmer days.10. The guards pay for vodka, which they
drink in large quantities, with any requested sum, and frequently with watches
and valuables.11. Jews arrived in Belzec looking for a
witness who would testify that Jews are being killed there. They were ready to
pay 12,000 zloty… They did not find a volunteer. … It is unknown by which means
the Jews are liquidated in the camp. There are three assumptions: (1) electricity;
(2) gas; (3) by pumping out the air.With regard to (1): there is no visible
source of electricity; with regard to (2): no supply of gas and no residue of
the remaining gas after the ventilation of the gas chamber were observed; with
regard to (3): there are no factors that deny this. It was even verified that
during the building of one of the barracks, the walls and the floor were
covered with metal sheets (for some purpose).In the area of the camp huge pits were dug
in the autumn [of 1941]. At that time it was assumed that there would be
underground stores. Now the purpose of this work is clear. From the particular
barrack where the Jews are taken for so-called disinfection, a narrow railway
leads to these pits. It was observed that the “disinfected” Jews were
transported to a common grave by this trolley.In Belzec the term Totenlager was heard in
connection with the Jewish camp. The leadership of the camp is in the hands of
twelve SS men (the commander is Hauptmann Wirth) who have forty guards for
help.[46]

The report is remarkable for a
number of reasons. Firstly, the AK observers reported on what they saw: 52
transports arriving, whereas “no Jews left the camp, neither during the day or
the night”. From this simple observation, they could deduce that something was
seriously awry at Belzec, and tested this against a variety of other,
enumerated observations. Like a detective in a locked-room mystery, they drew
the conclusion “that there is a mass murder of Jews inside the camp”. This is
in fact absolutely no different to that which can be deduced from German
documents and the physical condition of the site after liberation, and is just
as conclusive.

Only the precise murder method was
unclear to outside observers, and thus the AK summarised the thoughts of
nearby villagers as to what it was. The discrimination with which they weighed
up gas, electricity and the pumping out of air is also striking, as we have
here a documentation of the speculation that was circulating in the Lublin
countryside. Indeed, Zygmunt Klukowski, a Polish doctor living in Szczebrzeszyn,
Zamosc county, noted in his diary on April 16 that “we now know that every day
there is a train arriving at Belzec from Lublin and one from Lwow, each with
twenty cars. The Jews must get off, are taken behind a barbed-wire fence and
murdered by an electric current or poisoned with gas and then the corpses are
burned.”[47]

Deniers have long pointed gleefully
to reports of ‘electric chambers’ at Belzec without investigating the real
context. Some have even tried to parlay the hearsay reports spreading across
the Polish countryside into “eyewitness” accounts, a dishonesty which will be
examined further in Chapter 6. But none have bothered to track the spread of
the hearsay or to properly acknowledge that from the outset, there were
simultaneous reports of gassing. Indeed, Mattogno’s gloss on the reports, that
they did not specify “gas chambers using the exhaust gas from a diesel engine”,
is a particularly odious example of the fallacy of misplaced precision and a
classic instance of negationist misdirection. By omitting the AK report from
his analysis, Mattogno prevented his faithful flock from learning of a report
that might inflict too much cognitive dissonance on them.

It is not difficult to track the
spiral of hearsay which led to ‘electric chambers’ becoming strongly associated
with Belzec. But it is likewise not difficult to find references to Belzec
using gas. Several Delegatura reports claimed electricity, ignoring the
uncertainty in the original report[48], but
this did not stop Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, the prime minister of the Polish
government-in-exile, stating at a meeting on July 7, 1942 that “apparently, in
Belzec and Trawniki, murder with poison gas.”[49] The Pro
Memoria report covering the period from August 26 to October 19, 1942, was not
untypical in referring to gas chambers at Belzec.[50]
Moreover, the Polish underground was far from the only recipient of eyewitness
or hearsay reports regarding Belzec. The so-called ‘Working Group’ in Slovakia,
organised by among others Gisi Fleischmann, received reports in October 1942
from couriers travelling between Bratislava and ghettos in the Lublin district
which still accommodated surviving Slovak Jewish deportees, that Slovak Jews
had been evacuated “to the other side of the Bug”. Clarification was
forthcoming by the end of November: letters from survivors informed the
‘Working Group’ about “facilities” (Anstalten) for extermination by
“lethal fumes” located “near Belzec.”[51]

On the other hand, it seems that
rumours of electricity as the killing method at Belzec persisted most strongly
in the Galicia district to the east of Belzec. A Ukrainian nationalist
newspaper published by the OUN, Ideya i Chyn, referred to ‘electric
current’ as the method used “in Belzec” to kill the Jews being deported
westwards “out of Galicia... in an unknown direction.”[52] Two
further reports from Galicia are even more instructive in their contrasting
reports. Stemming from French and Belgian prisoners of war interned in the
Stalag at Rawa Ruska, a major rail junction not far from Belzec, who
successfully escaped across the Baltic to Sweden, the first report, taken down
in February 1943, cited hearsay of “electrocution en masse” about a massacre
and deportation at Tarnopol.[53] A
second report came from two Belgian POWs, who had observed hundreds of wagons
passing through the Rawa Ruska rail junction and returning empty. Those who
died on the way or were shot trying to escape were dumped unceremoniously onto
the side of the tracks.

What made the most impression on them was
the extermination of the Jews. They had both witnessed atrocities. One of the
Belgians saw truck loads of Jews carried off into a wood and the trucks
returning a few hours later – empty. Bodies of Jewish children and women were
left lying in ditches and along the railways. The Germans themselves, they
added, boasted that they had constructed gas chambers where Jews were
systematically killed and buried.[54]

The spread of knowledge was
therefore and not unsurprisingly, inconsistent. In 1944 a Jewish
survivor from the Galicia district, Adolf Folkmann, likewise escaped to Sweden
and brought with him a hearsay account of electrocution at Belzec, manifestly
elaborated in the telling and retelling.[55]
Mattogno, of course, gleefully cites this account at inordinate length, and
also cites a New York Times report from February 1944 which likewise
mentioned electricity as the killing method at Belzec.[56] What he
omits to mention is that the NYT report was based on the same source.[57] Other
survivors of the Holocaust in Galicia, including witnesses whose testimony was
included in the Black Book compiled by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman[58], as
well as Simon Wiesenthal, who wrote a lurid pamphlet in 1946 which additionally
spoke of human soap being manufactured from corpses, also referred to
electricity as the chosen killing method at Belzec.[59]

It is a matter of indifference to
us that rumours of a ‘soap factory’ attached themselves to Belzec, although it
seems to exercise Mattogno greatly[60], just as
it is a matter of indifference that distorted hearsay about electricity at
Belzec was demonstrably repeated, because in both cases the reports were
manifestly hearsay, something which seemingly eludes Mattogno’s
co-author Jürgen Graf when he conflates Wiesenthal and Szende into apparent
direct-eyeball witnesses.[61]
Historians have no great difficulty in distinguishing between such hearsay
reports and more direct accounts. The cloud of hearsay distortion surrounding
Belzec is a classic illustration of the adage ‘no smoke without fire’, as well
as a model example of how Chinese whispers develop. The reports demonstrate
that Belzec was referred to, over and over again, as a site of extermination.
The distortions generated by hearsay had a clear point of origin in fact, as
the Armia Krajowa report of April 1942 indicates. The facts were, indeed,
rather simple: Jews went in and did not come out.[62] Until
Mattogno and his sidekicks deal with those reports and explain why they
are to be set aside, then we will simply notch up ‘Belzec electric chambers’
alongside many another idiotic meme on the Denier Bullshit Bingo scorecard.

The implied argument within
Mattogno’s “propaganda thesis” – insofar as one can discern a coherent argument
at all – is that all reports can be traced back to Polish or Jewish sources.
This is refuted in the case of Belzec by a number of reports reaching neutral
recipients in 1942 and 1943, some of which have already been mentioned above.
One of the more important examples was the first report to definitively reach
the Swedish government in August 1942, filed by the Swedish consul in Stettin,
Vendel, after a meeting with a German Army officer, most likely associated with
the resistance circle around Henning von Tresckow. The report, dated August 20,
ran:

The treatment of the Jews, as described by
the person to whom I spoke, is of the kind that is impossible to express in
writing. That is why I limit myself to a few brief pieces of information. The
treatment differs in different locations, depending on the number of Jews. In
some cities there are Jewish quarters; in others there are ghettos surrounded
by high walls, which Jews can trespass only at the risk of being shot; finally,
in some others Jews enjoy some freedom of movement. Nevertheless, the aim is
the extinction of them all. The number of Jews murdered in Lublin is estimated
at 40,000. The Jews over fifty years of age and children under ten are
especially subjected to extermination. The rest are left alive in order to fill
the gap in the workforce; they will be exterminated as soon as they are no
longer useful. Their property is confiscated; it mostly falls into the hands of
SS men. In the cities all Jews are gathered; they are officially informed that
it is for the purpose of ‘delousing’. At the entrance they have to leave their
clothes, which are immediately sent to a ‘central warehouse of textile
materials’. Delousing is in practice gassing, after which all are packed into
previously prepared mass graves. The source from whom I received all the
information about the conditions in the General Government is such that there
can be no shadow of a doubt that his description is true.[63]

At virtually precisely the same
time, as is well known, Kurt Gerstein visited Belzec, and upon his return
informed the Swedish diplomat Baron von Otter of what he had witnessed there.
Although Otter corroborated Gerstein’s 1945 claim to have passed on the news,
no documentary trace survived in the files of the Swedish Foreign Office.[64] The
Vendel report, however, does. The reference to the liquidation of the Lublin
ghetto places the report and its mention of gassing in direct connection with
Belzec. Another report that can be directly connected with Belzec is a letter
from the Metropolitan of the Ukrainian Uniate Church in Lwow, Sheptyts’kyi, to
the Vatican at the end of August 1942, which spoke of the murder of 200,000
Jews in Eastern Galicia.[65]
The accumulation of such reports helps corroborate a wartime report based on
information from Kurt Gerstein that does survive, namely the report of Gerstein’s
friend in the Netherlands, J.H. Ubbink, written down in Dutch after a 1943 meeting
with Gerstein in Berlin. Gerstein reported to Ubbink on his visit to ‘killing
facilities’ (Tötungsanstalten) in Poland, specifically including
‘Belsjek’, where he witnessed a gassing of Jews. As the 1943 report stated
(perhaps not entirely precisely relaying details from Gerstein account),
“Outside the building now a big tractor is started, the exhaust of which enters
the building.”[66]

Mattogno is completely silent on
the Ubbink report in Bełżec, and indeed has very little to say about
Gerstein in that brochure. He might well reply by pointing to his discussion of
Gerstein in Treblinka (!)[67], and to
his 1980s book on Gerstein – unfortunately, not a single copy of the latter
book appears to be available in any library of the present author’s home
country, so it might as well not exist for all practical purposes.[68] The discombobulation
and incoherence produced by his refusal to discuss the Ubbink report in its
proper context – wartime reports about Belzec – and the more general refusal to
analyse the three camps together is in our view a typical example of Mattogno’s
dishonesty and intellectual vapidity.

One point that has not so far been
aired regarding the reports of Belzec – there are more, but it would be merely
bouncing the rubble to repeat them all – is the striking mention in the AK
report of April 1942 of none other than a ‘police captain’ by the name of Wirth
who commanded Belzec. It would be a colossal coincidence that the Polish
resistance would succeed in naming the same man as is documented in German
records as involved directly in Aktion Reinhard. With literally thousands of
camps in Poland, the odds of the Polish resistance arbitrarily picking Belzec
and picking Wirth by chance are indeed, astronomical. MGK might well respond by
conceding that Wirth was the commandant of Belzec, but at the cost of
confirming a detail mentioned by more than a few witnesses (see Chapter 6).

Mattogno’s refusal to discuss all
three Aktion Reinhard camps together leads him into yet another argumentative
cul-de-sac in Sobibór. Noting that there were relatively few reports
about the camp[69],
he does not stop to ask why. But this is intuitively obvious: Sobibor was even
more remotely located than Belzec or Treblinka, and the news of the camp
arrived at a time when reports of Chelmno and Belzec were accumulating, so that
Polish underground intelligence bulletins and newspapers frequently bracketed
Sobibor together with other camps.

Nonetheless, news began to
accumulate in June 1942, especially reports received by Oneg Shabes in Warsaw.
A postcard from Wlodawa, Chelm county, sent on June 1, 1942 warned that “uncle”
(the Nazis) was preparing “the same kind of wedding for the children that we
had here” and building a new house “very near to you”, and that the “best
remedy for this illness” was to go into hiding.[70] Written
in veiled code, the message was received and understood by Oneg Shabes, as two
couriers, Frumka Plotnicka and Chava Folman, reported back from Rejowiec and
Hrubieszow with the news that Sobibor was the destination of the Jews deported
from this region, and was like Belzec.[71] A fugitive
from Biala Podlaska, another town in the Lublin district caught up in the
Sobibor deportations at this time, also made his way to Warsaw and informed
Emanuel Ringelblum, the chief organiser of Oneg Shabes, of what had transpired: “a population ‘transfer’ (it would be more
accurate to speak of a transfer’ into the beyond’) to Sobibor near Chelm, where
Jews are poisoned with gas.”[72]

Another Warsaw diarist, Abraham
Lewin, spoke with a girl from Deblin-Irena who had escaped deportation on July
5, hearing a lengthy account of the brutal and violent circumstances of the
deportation and how the surviving Jews tried to find out where the deportees
had been sent. A Jewish woman bribed a “Gestapo agent” (presumably, a Polish
informer) for information. “He told her that in Sobibor he had not found the
men he was looking for. He had been told that the men had been taken to Pinsk.
We should assume that this was just a pretext. He couldn’t find them because
they were probably no longer in this world. For his trouble and his travel
expenses, the agent extorted from the unfortunate wife and mother 1,000 zloty.”[73] Indeed,
no Jews arrived from anywhere in the Pinsk ghetto at this or any other time[74]; Lewin
correctly deduced that the story was false. “What happened in Deblin,” he
continued, “also happened in the surrounding Jewish small towns such as
Baranow, Micow, and Ryki. In the place of the deported Jews, Slovakian and
Czech Jews were brought in. They took over the small houses of the deportees.
The Jews who have been brought in work for the Germans. They are held in
barracks, that means that they are in a labour camp all week and can come home
to the town only on Sundays.”[75]

Lewin was a fairly well informed
observer who had already noted on May 30 that the number of victims in Galicia
had reached 100,000.[76] Lewin’s
diary entry on Sobibor is instructive, as it accurately reflects Nazi policy at
this time: extermination coupled with forced labour, Polish Jews – especially
the unfit - deported to the death camps while Jews from Slovakia and the Reich
were moved in temporarily to replace them, being targeted for deportation in
later waves.[77]
The diary also reflects the blatant dissembling of the Nazis over where the
Jews had gone, and the refusal of more and more Jews to believe the fairy-tales
of ‘resettlement’. To take the claim of a deportation from Deblin-Irena to
Pinsk literally, one would moreover have to presume that every survivor of the
Pinsk ghetto was in on a gigantic conspiracy of silence, and that all German
records from the Generalkommissariat Wolhynien have been falsified; moreover, even
if all of these hurdles were straddled, as we will see in Chapter 2, the
Jews of Pinsk were murdered in October 1942 in a mass shooting.

Other Warsaw diarists, meanwhile,
did not fully assimilate the news. Chaim Kaplan still thought on July 10, 1942,
that Sobibor was a gigantic work camp.[78] Given
that Sobibor was encircled with a penumbra of satellite labour camps, this was
a partial truth of sorts. Indeed, a more detailed wartime report from Sobibor
hailed precisely from one of the lucky few to be selected at Sobibor and sent
to a nearby labour camp. It was produced by an anonymous Slovakian Jewish
deportee who survived until at least August 1943 in the region and then
escaped, and whose account was smuggled out to the ‘Working Group’, who then
passed it on to the Czechoslovak embassy in Switzerland.[79]
Although reproduced almost in full in Jules Schelvis’ book on Sobibor[80],
Mattogno does not see fit to acknowledge this source properly.

The report describes the writer’s
deportation to Rejowiec and life in the ghetto and labour camp there, until on
August 9, 1942, the ghetto and labour camp were both hit by a deportation to
Sobibor[81],
beginning with the usual massacre of the sick and escalating into an
indiscriminate mass shooting of part of the assembled population, leaving
around 700 Jews dead. The remaining 2,000 were transported to Sobibor,
accompanied by Trawnikis (“black Ukrainians”). On arrival, men and women were
separated, and a selection was carried out, picking out 155 men and women. They
were told by an SS lieutenant, “you have been reborn.” They were then taken to
the labour camp at Krychow, where they became part of a contingent of 1200
workers composed of 400 Czech, 200 Slovak and 600 Polish Jews. Deaths were
numerous, and the group of 155 from Rejowiec lost at least 60 to typhus and
exhaustion. A selection was carried out on October 16, with the selectees being
transported from the camp to Wlodawa, from where they were deported to Sobibor
four days later. Another selection took place on December 9, liquidating the
entire camp barring 110 people. In the first half of 1943, the Krychow camp was
expanded once more when the nearby labour camps at Osowa, Sawin, Sajozice and
Luta were liquidated, so that the number of inmates rose again to 553. In April
1943, the camp inmates were told that ‘Belgian and Dutch Jews’ would soon
arrive, but they never came. “In the vicinity of Sobibor,” the writer noted,
“one can always observe fire by night, and in a wide area one can register the
stink of burned hair. Various signs allow the conclusion (the population
asserts it in any case) that the corpses, which had been executed previously
through electricity and gas – and were later buried – are now exhumed and
burned, in order to leave no trace.”[82]

The writer’s descriptions of fires
burning at night and the stink of burning hair were direct observations, his
mention of “electricity and gas” were not. The mention of electricity indicates
how widespread this rumour was – it was also repeated for Treblinka – but more
problematic for Mattogno is why the Slovakian fugitive also mentioned gas. He
had spent too little time in the forecourt at Sobibor when selected and spared
for labour to learn anything of the exact inner workings of the camp, and as we
will see later, there was a great deal of uncertainty among the Sonderkommandos
working in the ‘outer camp’ at Sobibor about the precise killing mechanism.
Nonetheless, the fact that gas was being spoken of in Chelm county in 1942-3 is
instructive. It helps explain why underground newspapers were identifying gas
as the killing method at both Belzec and Sobibor by early August 1942.[83]

With the pause in operations at
Sobibor through the summer of 1942, reports about the camp unsurprisingly
declined, but this was not the case for Treblinka. The place name was already
associated with a forced labour camp, Treblinka I, established in November 1941
that over the course of the first half of 1942 had acquired a fearsome
reputation in Warsaw, as it swallowed up hundreds of Jews deported there for
slave labour.[84]
The start of the Warsaw ghetto action on July 22, 1942, however, could not be
mistaken for a mere labour transfer. On July 26, Stefan Korbonski radioed out
of Warsaw that Nazis

have begun the slaughter of the Warsaw
Ghetto. The order concerning the deportation of 6,000 was posted. One is
allowed to take 15kg of luggage and jewellery. So far two trainloads of people
were taken away, to meet death, of course. Despair, suicides. Polish police
have been removed, their place was taken by szaulisi[85],
Latvians, Ukrainians. Shooting on streets and in houses.[86]

News rapidly returned to the ghetto
and the city that the deportees, leaving Warsaw at the rate of 5,000 per day,
were turning off the main Warsaw-Minsk railway line at Malkinia and being sent
to another camp at Treblinka. The deputy commander of the Armia Krajowa,
General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski, later wrote:

Not later than July 29 we learned from
reports of the railway workers that transports were being taken to the
concentration camp of Treblinka and that the Jews were disappearing there
without a trace. There can no longer be any doubt that the deportations are the
beginning of an extermination.[87]

At this
point, communications between Warsaw and the government-in-exile in London seem
to have broken down, causing an ongoing postwar controversy that the
government-in-exile had delayed the news of the destruction of the Warsaw
ghetto. Bor-Komorski and Korbonski both claimed to have sent numerous radio
messages, but few reached London.[88] Courier
communications were also hampered by the rolling-up of the “Swedish connection”
shortly before the start of the action, ending an important outlet of
information via Swedish businessmen based in Warsaw who smuggled Delegatura
reports to Stockholm.[89] The
delays in news reaching London seriously affected how the Warsaw ghetto action
and Treblinka were reported. The Times, for example, published a Reuters
report datelined Zurich on August 17 stating that the head of the Jewish
Council in Warsaw, Adam Czerniaków, had committed suicide after refusing to
provide list of 100,000 Jews who would be deported to “an unknown destination
in the east”, adding that Czerniaków realised “that the 100,000 would most
probably be massacred.”[90]

Inside Poland, meanwhile, the
Delegatura as well as other underground observers were confirming that the
deportees were indeed being massacred. A report from the commander of the Armia
Krajowa, General Rowecki, sent on August 19 and reaching London on August 15,
stated:

Since July 22, liquidation of the Warsaw
ghetto (400,000 inhabitants) has continued with great cruelty by the German
police and Latvian auxiliary police. Till now 5-6 and at present 15 thousand daily
have been deported. Apparently, the majority is murdered in Belzec and
Treblinka, a part seems to be assigned to labor behind the front line. Mass
killings and robbery along with deportation. Several tens of thousands of
skilled craftsmen and their families are to remain in the ghetto. To this point
more than 150,000 have been deported.[91]

Biuletyn
Informacyjny, the AK’s official newspaper,
similarly wrote on August 20 that “extermination in a camp near Treblinka in
gas chambers” was taking place.[92]

Both dispatches to London as well
as newspaper articles could not of course include more extensive details, but
these were noted and recorded in other reports. During August and September,
the Delegatura rapidly accumulated information about Treblinka, which unsurprisingly
began with confused descriptions which gradually became more accurate. The
edition of Current Information of August 17 – the same day as news of Czerniaków’s
suicide was reported in London – wrote that up to August 7, 113,100 had been
deported from Warsaw to Treblinka, along with Jews from other cities and towns
in Poland such as Radom. Of their fate upon arrival, the report wrote

After the engine leaves the station, they
force the Jews to undress in order to go, supposedly, to the showers. Actually
they are taken to the gas chambers, exterminated there, and then buried in
prepared pits, sometimes when they are still alive. The pits are dug with
machines. The gas chambers are mobile, and they are situated above the pits.[93]

The
observation about mobile gas chambers, it was noted, could not be corroborated
by any other source.[94] A
follow-up report, dated September 8, elaborated further on the camp:

The Treblinka extermination camp, the place
where the Jews are being killed, is located near the labour camp. It is
situated 5km from the Treblinka station, and 2km from Poniatowo station. There
is a direct telephone link to Malkinia. There is an old camp (for Poles) and a
new camp whose construction is still under way (exclusively for Jews)... The
extermination of the Jews is now carried out in a way that is completely
independent of the old camp. A locomotive pushes the wagons with the Jews to
the platform. The Ukrainians remove the Jews from the cats and lead them to the
“shower to bathe”. This building is fenced off with barbed wire. They enter it
in groups of 300-500 people. Each group is immediately closed hermetically
inside, and gassed. The gas does not affect them immediately, because the Jews
still have to continue on to the pits that are a few dozen meters away, and
whose depth is 30 metres. There they fall unconscious, and a digger covers them
with a thin layer of earth. Then other groups arrive... Soon we will relay an
authentic testimony of a Jew who succeeded in escaping from Treblinka”.[95]

Mattogno cites from both of these
reports with virtually no comment[96], as
part of a section of verbatim quotes which are evidently intended to create the
impression of great confusion and inaccuracy. His circumspection, however,
simply begs the question as to what his argument actually is. In fact, it would
appear that he doesn’t have an argument here, and is advancing what
might be called the non-argument argument, whereby the mere act of quoting
something is supposedly sufficient to prove a point that is not even outlined,
much less explained. That early news reports are invariably somewhat garbled is
more or less taken for granted by everyone other than conspiracy theorists, who
seem to find discrepancies fascinating in and of themselves, or take them for
proof of nefarious goings-on orchestrated by the New World
Order/Illuminati/Jews/Them, rather than seeing them for what they are, namely,
garbled reports.

In the two examples above, the
inaccuracies are easy to decipher: both of them offer confused
descriptions of how the bodies of the victims were taken from the gas chambers
to the mass graves. One has the gas chamber moving, the other has a
delayed-action gas so that the victims would stumble from the chamber to the
graves. Considering that in reality, the corpses of the victims were hauled to
the graves by exhausted slave labourers whose life expectancy in the first
phase of Treblinka was measured in days, and that use was also made of flatcars
travelling on field railway tracks from the chambers to the grave, both
descriptions are entirely plausible coming from a witness escaping the outer
camp at Treblinka who lacked either a precise line of sight or sufficient time
to register their impressions properly. As with other eyewitness distortions
about collapsing floors[97], such
distortions are exactly what one would expect. Moreover, such variations
clearly emanated from different eyewitness accounts, not from any kind of
‘literary evolution’ when the report-writers sat around the Shits ‘n’ Giggles
department at Hoaxter Central and deliberately decided to leave Important Clues
for conspiraloons to seize upon decades later. While we are fully aware that
this isn’t in fact Mattogno’s argument, it might as well be, because nowhere
does he even try to explain these reports or offer any kind of meaningful
argument about them.

Nor does Mattogno deal properly
with the fact that detailed reports on Treblinka reached two recipients
at this time, the Polish underground as well as the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto.
Given the chaos of the Warsaw ghetto action and the mass round-ups forcing Jews
into hiding, it is unsurprising that activists in the ghetto found it difficult
to learn accurate news until well into the deportation. Nonetheless, the Jewish
social democratic party, the Bund, succeeded in sending emissaries to Sokolow
Podlaski by the end of August, whose reports were used by Leon Feiner to write
one of several reports recorded at this time.[98] The
Bund newspaper Oif der Vach published a lengthy article about Treblinka
on September 20:

‘The Jews of Warsaw Are Killed in Treblinka’During the first week of the “deportation
Aktion” Warsaw was flooded with greetings from the deported Jews. The greetings
arrived from Białystok, Brest-Litovsk, Kosov, Malkinia, Pinsk, Smolensk. All
this was a lie. All the trains with the Warsaw Jews went to Treblinka, where
the Jews were murdered in the most cruel way. The letters and greetings came
from people who succeeded in escaping from the trains or from the camp. It is
possible that in the beginning, from the first transports, some of the Warsaw
Jews were sent to Brest-Litovsk or Pinsk, in order that their greetings would
mislead, deceive, and provoke false illusions among the Jews in Warsaw.
Actually, what was the fate of the deported Jews? We know it from the stories
of the Poles and of those Jews who succeeded in escaping from the trains or
from Treblinka…The size of Treblinka was one-half square
kilometer. It was surrounded by three fences of barbes wire… After unloading
the train of the living and the dead, the Jews were led into the camp… During
the descent from the train, shots were fired on those who were slow or even for
no reason. Those who died en route or were shot on the spot were buried between
the first and the second fence…The women and children from the arriving
transport were divided into groups of 200 each and were taken to the “baths”.
They had to take off their clothes, which remained on the spot, and were taken
naked to a small barrack called the “bath”, which was located close to the
digging machine. From the bath nobody returned, and new groups were entering
there constantly. The bath was actually a house of murder. The floor in this
barrack opened up and the people fell into a machine. According to the opinion
of some of those who escaped, the people in the barrack were gassed. According
to another opinion, they were killed by electrical current. From the small
tower over the bath, there were constant shots. There was talk that the shots
were aimed at the people inside the barrack and those who survived the gas. The
bath absorbs 200 people every fifteen minutes, so in twenty-four hours the
killing capacity is 20,000 people. That was the explanation for the incessant
arrival of people in the camp, from where there was no return, except a few
hundred who succeeded in escaping during the whole time…. During the daytime
women and children were liquidated and during the nights, the men…The escape from the camp was difficult and
dangerous, but there were people who tried to do it, in spite of the fact that
the camp was strongly illuminated during the night… Why wasn’t a mass escape
organised? There were rumours in the camp that it was surrounded by a strong
guard and the fences were electrified. The people were broken from their
experiences at the Umschlagplatz, on the train and in the camp. The general
depression influenced also those who were, by nature, more active…An SS man gave a speech before each of the
arriving transports and promised that all of them would be sent for work in
Smolensk or Kiev.The night between August 19 and 20, when
Warsaw was bombarded, there was a blackout in the camp for the first time. An
SS man addressed the assembled Jews. He told them that an agreement had been reached
between the German government and Roosevelt about the transfer of European Jews
to Madagascar. In the morning they would leave Treblinka with the first
transport. This announcement aroused a great joy among the Jews. As soon as the
all-clear signal was given, the extermination machine started its “normal”
activity. Even inside the camp, the Nazis continued to mislead the Jews until
the last moment…There were three such camps: one in the
vicinity of Pinsk for the eastern area, another in the area of Lublin at Belzec,
and the third, the largest, was Treblinka near Malkinia.[99]

As with many other such sources,
this report is ignored by Mattogno, although one might expect the references to
‘electrical current’ to excite him. Indeed, diarists in the ghetto continued to
refer to electricity well into October. Oneg Shabes activist Peretz Opoczynski
reported rumours of a “giant electric chair” in Treblinka, capable of killing
ten thousand Jews and Poles each day. “The Germans like to brag about their
industrial prowess,” he wrote, “and so they also want to run their killing
industry with American efficiency.”[100]Emanuel Ringelblum likewise reported in a
long diary entry, undoubtedly dated retrospectively to October 15, once the
deportation action was over, of “the news about the gravediggers (Rabinowicz,
Jacob), the Jews from Stok who escaped from the wagons... the unanimous
description of the “bath”, the Jewish gravediggers with yellow patches on their
knees. – The method of killing: gas, steam, electricity.”[101]

Unanimous the reports may have been
about the existence of a “bath”, there was still much confusion about the
precise killing method at Treblinka, as Ringelblum’s diary entry and its
smorgasbord of “gas, steam, electricity” indicates. Jacob Rabinowicz’s account
had in fact described gas chambers, even specifying the use of a “diesel”
engine.[102] As
will be seen in Chapter 5, calling the killing engine a “diesel” seems to have
been part of the Lagerjargon of Aktion Reinhard, a misnomer borrowed
from the diesel generator supplying electricity to the camp, which was located
more or less alongside the petrol driven gassing engine. Thus can several
inaccuracies be traced back to a similar root cause.

Another account by a Treblinka
escapee written down at this time is entirely ignored by Mattogno in his
attempt at tracing “the development of the idea of Treblinka as an
extermination camp”, namely the lengthy description given by Abraham Krzepicki
and recorded by Oneg Shabes activist Rachel Auerbach in October 1942.[103]
Krzepicki’s report, which will be referred to several times in this critique,
also identified a gas chamber. As both Rabinowicz and Krzepicki had referred to
gas chambers, it is mildly hard to understand why the long report compiled by
Oneg Shabes activist Hersz Wasser on the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and
the extermination camp at Treblinka, dated November 15, 1942 referred to steam
chambers.[104]
But only mildly hard to understand, for steam is, after all, a gas, and it is
not difficult to see how the anonymous source describing steam to Wasser could
have deduced that the victims were being killed with steam when witnessing the
opening of a gas chamber and mistaken the emanation of exhaust fumes from the
chamber for a lethal sauna.

Wasser’s report reached London by
January 1943 and was published virtually in full by the end of the year in The
Black Book of Polish Jewry.[105] It was
undoubtedly the source for many references to killing by steam appearing outside
Poland through to 1945. A summary was included in a newspaper article
appearing in the New York Times in August 1943[106], while
another version of the long report was published in Switzerland by Adolf
Silberschein in 1944.[107]
Mattogno naturally records all of this and devotes the majority of a chapter to
reprinting these accounts verbatim.[108] What
he does not do is explain why further reports on Treblinka written in Poland in
late 1942 and 1943 consistently talked of gas chambers. Thus, the Pro Memoria
report covering August 26 to October 10, 1942 spoke of the use of “suffocating
gas” at Treblinka[109], as
did the report covering March 25 to April 23, 1943, while also describing the
first measures to erase the evidence of the crime by covering the graves in
quicklime.[110]

Even if Mattogno or his acolytes
were to cling to the repetition of ‘steam chambers’ outside Poland, then they
would still be ignoring reports of gas chambers at Treblinka that not only
reached the outside world, but were also published. One Treblinka escapee,
David Milgroim, who was deported from Czestochowa in 1942 and broke out of the
camp after one week, eventually made his way to Slovakia where his report was
recorded at the end of August 1943, being passed to the OSS in Istanbul by
early 1944.[111]
Milgroim’s description of the killing process was as follows:

The
naked people who were brought there were herded into those barracks, and told
that they are going to be bathed. When a batch of them is inside, poison gas
was let in. Those still outside naturally tried desperately to back away when
they realised what was going on inside. Then the SS and the Ukrainians with
their bloodhounds went into action and forced them in. The cries we had heard
came from such crowds at the moment of entering. When a batch was inside the
door was closed and remained so for fifteen minutes. When it was opened again,
everyone inside was dead. Now the 500 Jews employed there had to throw the
corpses into the fire-ditch which stretched beyond the fence into the
death-camp. Those 500 Jews were in terrible condition of physical and psychic
decay. They also got very little food, and ten or twelve committed suicide
daily. From their “work” they all emitted a penetrating cadaverous smell, and
it was this smell which betrayed our two informants, who were discovered among
us and marched away by guards.

An
anonymous version of this report was published in January 1944 in the Canadian
Jewish Chronicle; key lines match word for word, and thus the published
version can be firmly traced back to Milgroim’s report.[112]

In reducing his discussion of the
wartime reports to the killing method alone, Mattogno also ignores a wealth of
evidence concerning the progression of the deportations. Not all such reports,
of course, were always accurate. For example, an account written down by a
fugitive from Hrubieszow reaching the Warsaw ghetto and archived by Oneg Shabes
described the Aktion in Hrubieszow at the start of June 1942 in great detail,
but stated that the deportation went to Belzec rather than Sobibor.[113]
Information could be conveyed as a mixture of accurate and inaccurate reports.
In January 1943, the Delegatura noted accurately that “new transports of Jews
to their death continue to arrive. For example: on November 20, 1942, forty
freight cars arrived from Biala Podlaska.; on November 21 and 22, every day
forty freight cars from Bialystok; on November 24, forty freight cars from
Grodno. During these five days, thirty-two freight cars with Jew’s clothing
were sent from Treblinka to the Reich” but incorrectly stated that “lately
there are transports with Jews from eastern Galicia and Rumania.”[114] By
1943, the Delegatura was routinely identifying deportations, as the following
excerpts from a weekly report from the end of June 1943 shows.

Lukow: After a week-long massacre, the
liquidation of the ghetto in Lukow finally ended in the first days of June. A
thousand persons were taken away to the camp at Treblinka, a small number of
Jews escaped, and 2,000 were murdered on the spot....Trawniki: Selections are conducted in the
Trawniki camp every few days, and the selectees go either to Sobibor or to a peat-cutting
about six km from the camp. The pit or its surrounding area serve as an
execution site for persons deemed unfit for work.[115]

Polish underground newspapers
reported on the deportation of Dutch Jews to Sobibor and Bulgarian Jews to
Treblinka in the spring of 1943[116], while the Pro Memoria monthly report for July 26 to August 26,
1943, synthesised information from sources such as the weekly report quoted
above to note the presence of Dutch Jews in the Dorohucza forced labour camp,
the same site as the “peat-cutting about six km from” Trawniki mentioned above.[117]

Contrary to a rather wild claim by
Mattogno, the Polish underground also reported on the open air cremations at
the death camps.[118]
It takes a special effort to ask in regard to open-air cremations at Treblinka
“how does it happen that there is no mention of this in any of the reports of
the Polish resistance movement?”[119], and
not realise that your own source spells it out[120] while
the standard work on the Reinhard camps quotes the same point.[121] But
apparently that is the standard of research and level of accuracy that Mattogno
thinks is acceptable when discussing this issue.

Although we could recapitulate even
more examples, the essential point has been made: wartime reports of Belzec,
Sobibor and Treblinka consistently identified them as extermination camps, and
such reports reached multiple recipients while originating from multiple points
of origin. The killing methods were not always clear, but this is unsurprising
given the organisation of all three camps into ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ camps as
well as the relatively small number of escapees until the revolts in Treblinka
and Sobibor during August and October 1943. Nonetheless, the preponderance of
reports about the killing method identified gas or gas chambers. The most
prevalent misinterpretations, steam and electricity, are not difficult to trace
back to plausible origins, namely in exhaust fumes seen from a distance and the
presence of electricity generators. Above all else, the Polish underground was able
to track the course of the deportations with considerable accuracy and could
observe transports entering the camps and not coming out.

It is not the task of this critique
to detail every available wartime report on Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. It is, however,
Mattogno’s task, if he wants to stand a chance in hell of advancing a coherent
explanation for them. Quite possibly, Mattogno might retreat to the seeming
safe haven of whining that many wartime reports were vague, or lacked this or
that precise detail, or failed to live up to whatever other exacting but
entirely arbitrary standard he can think of. The assumption underlying this
particular fallback gambit is that there could somehow be perfect transparency
and clarity of information, and that the inner workings of the death camps were
somehow on public display and could be described perfectly from the get-go. No
attempt, of course, is made by Mattogno to justify this assumption, although it
clearly lurks beneath his presentation of the wartime reports. Inaccuracy or
vagueness, however, doesn’t equal ‘hoax’ any more than contradiction or anomaly
equals ‘hoax’.

On
the contrary: the ability of the Polish underground as well as other observers
to hit the intelligence jackpot and learn such precise details as the presence
of Wirth at Belzec in the spring of 1942, as well as
the week-by-week tracking of developments in 1943, beg serious questions about
the plausibility of Revisionist claims that reports of extermination and
gassing in the six camps of Poland where gassing took place can be dismissed as
mere “propaganda”. For the Polish resistance succeeded in identifying not just
one or two but all six camps as sites utilising gassing.[122] This
begs a set of questions which are nowhere even vaguely answered by Mattogno,
Graf or Kues, starting with: why? If this really was just some kind of
Polish underground “propaganda”, why would they misidentify six camps
that MGK declare to be ‘transit camps’ one and all, as death camps? Why would
they write false reports about camps swallowing up train after train, if in
fact there were other trains taking the deportees on their merry way to Russia
or wherever the hell it is they supposedly went? Why would they do so starting
from the very beginning of 1942 with Chelmno and Belzec? Why did other
observers – Jewish organisations in Poland and Slovakia, Ukrainian nationalists
and churchmen, German officials, Swedish diplomats, the Dutch resistance and so
on – also receive such reports? Why is there literally no report from this time
mentioning trains continuing onwards from these specific camps to the occupied
Soviet territories en masse? MGK’s claims are simply wildly implausible.

The implausibility increases
exponentially when one considers the Nazi response to the spread of knowledge
of the extermination of the Jews across Europe. It is now well established that
from 1941 onwards, the Nazis said as little as possible about the deportation
of the Jews in the press, while continuing to pump out antisemitic propaganda
and publish speeches by Hitler as well as other leaders which proclaimed, time
and again, their intention to ‘destroy’ or ‘extirpate’ the Jews of Europe.[123]
Simultaneously, knowledge spread widely across Germany and into neutral
countries of the mass shootings in the occupied Soviet Union, another subject
that was taboo in the Nazi press.[124]
Knowledge of the ‘Riga Bloody Sunday’ and the mass execution of the Jews of
Borisov reached into Catholic and military circles on the home front with
little difficulty[125], and
spread quickly to the wider population as soldiers wrote letters home[126] or
when they returned on leave.[127]
Deserters from the Einsatzgruppen even reached Switzerland and recounted their
involvement in mass shootings in considerable detail to Swiss military
intelligence.[128]

The regime response was both
belated and transparently nonsensical. On October 9, 1942, the Party
Chancellery sent a circular to offices of the NSDAP with “confidential”
instructions on how to spin the Final Solution of the “Jewish Question”, in
which it was claimed that Nazi policy, “starting in the Reich itself and then
extending into other European countries included in the Final Solution,” was to
move the Jews “into large camps in the East, some already in existence, others
yet to be set up.”[129] This
was fine and good, were it actually the policy, but in fact, deported Jews were
disappearing from across Europe to “unknown destinations” where they could not
be reached by post or any other form of communication and would be reported as
“whereabouts unknown.”[130] The
absence of news from the deportees was a major red flag for neutral and Allied
observers alike.[131] Thus
when reports began to roll in of mass killings and extermination, Swiss
newspapers asked “are the deported Jews being killed?”[132], and
were met with silence from the Nazi press and media.

Indeed, Goebbels and the Propaganda
Ministry were quite clear that they could not stem the tide of reports of
extermination because they could not provide a plausible alibi, cover story or
proof-of-life. A conference on December 12, 1942, was devoted in part to
figuring out how to distract attention from the reports. Goebbels admitted
“that we do not have all that much to bring forth by way of counter-evidence.”[133] The
same day, he wrote in his diary that

The atrocity campaign about Poland and the
Jewish Question is assuming enormous dimensions on the other side. I fear that
over time we cannot master the issue with silence. We have to have some kind of
answer... It is best to go over to the offensive and talk about English
atrocities in India or the Middle East. Perhaps that will get the English to
keep quiet. In any case, by doing so, we change the subject and raise another
issue.[134]

Two days later, Goebbels admitted
that “there can be no question of a complete or practical refutation of the
allegations of anti-Jewish atrocities.”[135] The
half-hearted denials and denunciations of the United Nations Declaration on the
Extermination of the Jews, issued on December 17, 1942, prompted the following
response from the Polish government in exile:

Sir - In view of the German allegation that
the stories of German atrocities, published here, are "British propaganda
lies", it may be a useful suggestion that Mr. Eden should officially
challenge Germany to allow a special commission, consisting of neutrals and
International Red Cross representatives, to visit Poland.Let the Germans show to this commission on
the spot: (1) Where have the millions of Jews been deported to? (2) Where are,
and how many are still alive out of, the nearly 3,500,000 Polish Jews and
between 500,000 and 700,000 Jews deported to Poland from other occupied
countries during the year 1942?Yours faithfullySzm. Zygielbojm,Member of the National Council of the
Republic of PolandStratton House, Stratton Street, W1[136]

No such international or neutral
commissions, of course, ever visited the “large camps in the East” which the
Party Chancellery had spoken of in October 1942. The sole visit to any camp in
Poland organised by the Nazis to refute the reports of extermination was in
fact conducted by a tame Slovakian journalist, who was taken on a tour of the
Organisation Schmelt forced labour camp complex in Upper East Silesia in
December 1942 by Eichmann’s office. It may need to be pointed out to
geographically-challenged negationists that the Schmelt camps were to the west
of Auschwitz. When in the spring of 1943, the Catholic Church in Slovakia began
to denounce the deportations of Slovakian Jews and to ask what had happened to
them, the best that Eichmann and his men could think of was to offer to arrange
a visit to the Potemkin ghetto of Theresienstadt, hardly capable of
accommodating the several million missing deportees.[137]
Seventy-eight years after Zygielbojm’s letter, we are still waiting for a
coherent response from Hitler’s willing defense lawyers regarding the
whereabouts of the ‘missing Jews’, as we will see in Chapter 4. Alas for them,
Nazi Germany and its apologists forfeited the right to be taken seriously on
this question in 1943.

[24] The term propaganda can be found in the titles of Mattogno, Bełżec;
Carlo Mattogno, The Bunkers of Auschwitz: Black Propaganda versus History, Chicago:
Theses & Dissertations Press, 2004; Mattogno, Chelmno; MGK, Sobibór.

[28] For background on the Polish government-in-exile’s reactions to the
Holocaust, see David
Engel, In the Shadow of Auschwitz: The Polish Government-in-Exile and the
Jews, 1939-1942. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987, and
Facing a Holocaust. The Polish Government-in-Exile
and the Jews 1943-1945. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1993

[41] Kassow, Who Will Write Our History? p.291. This has caused a
number of authors to misidentify Szlamek’s real name as Grojanowski.

[42] Esther Farbstein, ‘Diaries and Memoirs as a Historical Source – The
Diary and the Memoir of a Rabbi at the ‘Konin House of Bondage’,’ YVS
XXVI, 1998, pp.87-128.

[43] Mattogno, Chelmno, pp.66-76. The criticisms levelled are
mostly paranoid nitpicks or statements of incredulity and incomprehension, for
example Mattogno does not consider that the description of the internal
workings of the gas van in Szlamek’s report are closer to the previous generation
of vans used by Sonderkommando Lange in its euthanasia operations across the
Warthegau in 1940-41. Cf. Patrick Montague, Chelmno and the
Holocaust. The History of Hitler’s First Death Camp. London: I.B. Tauris,
2011, pp.203-4, who comes to the same conclusion.

[47] Zygmunt Klukowski, Dziennik z lat okupacji, Lublin, 1959,
p.254; cf. Musial, Deutsche Zivilverwaltung, p.324; Puławski, W obliczu
Zagłady, p.291. The reference to the burning of corpses is a typical example of ‘slippage’:
it is not unlikely that rubbish was burned at the camp, which together with the
fact that deportees were entering the camp and not coming out, would be easily
misinterpreted at this stage. Later testimonies and reports about open-air
cremations are more detailed, as will be seen in Chapter 6.

[49] Stola, ‘Early News’, p.7. In a recent article, Thomas Kues has
highlighted a report appearing in the Polish exile newspaper Dziennik Polski on
11 July 1942, in which Mikolajczyk is quoted as referring to deportations to
‘Belzec and Treblinka’. As the official protocol of the cabinet meeting
apparently says ‘Trawniki’, the gambit – trying to stir up suspicion about a
too-early referece to deportations to Treblinka – fails utterly. Somewhere
along the chain of transmission from local underground organisation to London
and thence to the Dziennik Polski journalist, the information became garbled –
something which was clear from re-reading Stola’s article for this critique.
The present author previously expressed the suspicion that Udo Walendy had
altered the original newspaper to score a revisionist ‘goal’, and is happy to
accept that he was acting like, well, a Revisionist. See Thomas Kues, ‘A
Premature News Report on a ‘Death Camp’ for Jews’, Inconvenient History
3/3, 2011.

[53] Press Reading Bureau Stockholm to PID London, 24.2.43, PRO FO
371/34427. The report was first highlighted in 1990 in David Bankier, The
Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion under Nazism, Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1992, p.110.

[59]Simon Wiesenthal,
‘Seifenfabrik Belsetz,’ Der neue Weg, Nr. 19/20, 1946. We thank Dr. Joachim Neander for a copy of
this article. On Wiesenthal’s rather complex self-presentation after the war,
see the engaging recent biography by Tom Segev, Simon
Wiesenthal. The Life and Legends, London: Jonathan Cape, 2010, which unlike
denier rantings aimed at one of their favourite hate-figures, at least has the
virtue of being readable.

[61]Jürgen Graf, The Giant With Feet of Clay. Raul Hilberg and his Standard Work on
the "Holocaust". Chicago: Theses and
Dissertations Press, 2001., p.83

[62] This was emphasised by the Polish underground press in the first
half of1942 regarding Belzec, which was identified as “a special camp, where
the expelled Jews are concentrated and apparently murdered” (WRN, 7/89,
27.4.1942, a socialist paper), and about which “all signs indicate that the
murder of thousands of people takes place in this camp” (Biuletyn
Informacyjny Nr 22 (126), 3.6.1942) and that it was a camp “from which no
one returns” (Szaniec, Nr 12 (86), 15.6.1942, a right-wing paper),
citations from Friedrich, Der nationalsozialistische Judenmord, pp.174-5, 112,
235. The degree of unanimity across the political spectrum is also worth
emphasising.

[66] The report is facsimiled in Louis de Jong, Een Sterfgeval in
Auschwitz, Amsterdam, 1967 and 1970, without pagination. On the Ubbink
report see also Louis De Jong, ‘Die Niederlande in Auschwitz’, VfZ 17/1,
1969, pp.1-16, and more recently Florent Brayard, ‘An Early Report by Kurt
Gerstein’, Bulletin du Centre de recherche francais a Jerusalem 6, 2000,
pp.157-174.

[94] A mobile gas chamber was also recorded in the diary of Wehrmacht
captain Wilm Hosenfeld on 6.9.1942. In our view, this would trace back to the same
original source. Entry published in Wladyslaw Szpilman, Das wunderbare
Überleben. Warschauer Erinnerungen 1939-1945. Düsseldorf, 1998, p.197ff

[104] The Polish original is published in Marczewska/Waźniewski, ‘Treblinka
w świetle Akt Delegatury’, pp.138-145; for English translations, see below.

[105] J. Apenszlak (ed), The Black Book of Polish Jewry, pp.141-7.
This title can be read free of charge at Hathi Trust Digital Library, so will
not be reproduced here.

[106] ‘2,000,000 Murders by Nazis Charged, Polish Paper in London Says
Jews Are Exterminated in Treblinka Death House’, NYT, 8.8.1943, p.11,
citing an article published in Polish Labor Fights on 7.8.1943. Poland
Fights, a related organisation, recorded the existence of a ‘Tremblinka III’
for Jews alongside a ‘Tremblinka II’ for Poles in an enumeration of camps in
Poland appended to Poland Fights, Oswiecim – Camp of Death, New York,
1944, pp.45-6. The ‘Tremblinka’ report referencing steam was also published in
the Canadian Jewish Chronicle, 20.8.1943.

[127][127] See the extensive documentation of reports among the German
population in Otto Dov Kulka and Eberhard Jäckel (eds), Die Juden in den
geheimen NS-Stimmungsberichten 1933-1944, Düsseldorf, 2004